It’ll take more than tech for Elon Musk to pull off audacious new Tesla master plan

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Andrew Maynard is a professor in the Arizona State University School for the Future of Innovation in Society. He is a member of the World Economic Forum Global Agenda "metacouncil" on emerging technologies.

Elon Musk – CEO of Tesla Motors – has just revealed the second part of his master plan for the company. And it’s a doozy. Not content with producing sleek electric cars (which to be fair, was only ever a stepping stone to greater things), Musk wants to fundamentally change how we live our lives. But the road to Musk’s techno-utopia may be rocky.

Yet underpinning them is a revolutionary vision for transforming society. Elon Musk doesn’t just want to fast-track the transition to renewable energy and self-driving cars – he wants to rewrite the rulebook on how we build a futuristic sustainable society.

Shifting the culture with new technologies

This comes through loud and clear in his fourth step in the new master plan. Once there are enough privately owned fully autonomous Teslas on the road, Musk wants to co-opt them into the “Tesla shared fleet.” The concept is as simple as it is audacious: Instead of your Tesla sitting idle in the garage or parking lot when not in use, it would become part of a network of fully autonomous ride-share vehicles – providing driverless lifts for customers on-demand and income for individual vehicles’ owners.

Musk’s concept is a natural fusion of several trends in technology: autonomous vehicles, the internet of things, artificial intelligence, the sharing economy, to name just a few. Technologically, it makes perfect sense – especially when you throw in innovative solar and battery technologies to keep the fleet mobile and energy-efficient.

Yet to succeed, it would require a seismic shift in modern culture – not only in how we live our lives, but also how we think about possessions and ownership. Importantly, this brave new world would have to navigate our existing values and cultural norms.

And here’s the rub: While Musk and his teams have the technical know-how to implement the master plan, it’s not clear yet whether they have the social and political savvy to make it work.

Just going by the numbers, Tesla’s autopilot technology makes sense. According to Musk, Tesla occupants using the autopilot feature are statistically safer than those not using it. And the more the feature is used, the better it will get at ensuring the car’s occupants are safe – thanks to the machine learning that is constantly enhancing the fleet’s auto-capabilities.

But when it comes to technology innovation, numeric logic is often trumped by what we intuitively think and feel is important. As we’ve seen in discussions around autonomous vehicles, how many people are likely to be killed or injured is often less important than who might be killed (whether driver, passengers or pedestrians), how, and who (or what) makes the decisions. Here, even the argument that autonomous vehicles save lives (and are safer than human-driven vehicles) faces an uphill struggle.

That’s not to say that the hurdles Tesla and Musk face in implementing their master plan are insurmountable – they’re not. But as Musk begins to implement part two of the plan, he’s going to need to become increasingly adept at navigating an ever more complex social and political landscape.

Innovating through the wicked problems

Musk appears to be aware of this. In 2015, through the Future of Life Institute (FLI), he backed a US$11 million research program to support the robust and beneficial development of artificial intelligence – an important technology for carrying out his master plan. Included in this initiative is the Strategic Artificial Intelligence Research Center – a collaboration between Oxford and Cambridge universities that aims to help develop policies to minimize the risks and maximize the benefits from artificial intelligence.

The tea leaves suggest Musk is thinking broadly about what it takes to develop societally successful technologies. Yet to succeed in his master plan, I suspect he’ll need to think more broadly still – and fast.

Part of the issue is that the relationship between technology and society is highly complex and constantly shifting. Successfully developing transformative technologies while benefiting society as a whole leads to what some are fond of calling “wicked” problems – problems that are so slippery they change and shift in response to attempts to solve them. (If you want an example, just look at the introduction and use of genetically modified foods.) Changing society through new solar technologies, autonomous vehicles and driverless car-sharing will take a lot more than smart technologies, safety research and policy recommendations.

To be sure, Elon Musk’s master plan for Tesla Motors is nothing if not inspired. It’s visionary, elegant, likely to improve lives and technologically within reach. Yet without coming to grips with the increasingly complex social and political challenges it faces, the plan runs the risk of not getting much further than the metaphorical paper it’s written on.

And that would be a shame. Because – implemented responsibly – Musk’s vision could be a game changer for how we go about building a more sustainable world.